Archive for July, 2010

I pulled out my old Bluetooth A2DP headphones and tried to get them to work with my Dell Inspiron 1525 today. As usual, getting everything working wasn’t as easy as it was supposed to be.

I could get the headset to pair correctly. It also worked fine in “handset” mode – i.e. to make phone calls. But I wanted to listen to music and my device wouldn’t “connect” to “Bluetooth Stero Audio”. Annoying.

I’m not 100% sure that the problem was generic to my laptop model, or specific to my computer due to some software incompatibility. After some web searching, I decided to try downloading and installing the Bluetooth drivers from a more current Dell model, the Vostro 1401. This uses uses the same Bluetooth module, the Dell 355. Things seem to be working so far.

My Inspiron 1525 has intermittently not been charging while plugged in. It’s gotten worse, as many intermittent problems tend to do. So, it was time for a bit of research.

It’s intermittent, so the charger generally works. I do have some battery life when it’s charged, so the charging circuits and the battery do work, though, this two year old battery doesn’t hold much power anymore.

If you search the web, it turns out to be a relatively common problem – remember, Dell sold millions of these laptops, you would expect a few problems to be reported. This laptop power connector consists of a pin in the centre of a circular connector which itself has two metal contacts, one on the inside and one on the outside of the circular ring. The inside pin is used to identify the A/C adaptor as being an authentic Dell charger. If the centre pin does not make contact with the socket on the laptop, then it will not charge; however, it will still work while plugged in.

So, I ever so slightly bent the inside pin to the side so that it would make contact again, and it seems to be working. I’ll wonder how long it will last though.

Given how often I move my laptop around, I think it was just general wear and tear rather than a manufacturing problem. Though, I wonder if there was a legitimate purpose to the identification pin. Can an non-authentic Dell power brick really damage the battery charging circuits, while still being OK to power the laptop in “plugged in” mode?

[Edit: Hmm… upon reading some more about this, new laptops might need a way to communicate with the power brick to determine maximum power output. If the maximum output of the transformer is too low, then the laptop can skip the battery charging to keep total power consumption down. This also would be useful in “airplane” mode where there is a very limited amount of power from the outlet.]

Anyway, I’ve had a very similar problem happen with a cellphone charger a couple years back, so the fix wasn’t all that unique. Let’s hope that someday we can all have magnetic power connectors like the Apple guys…

I’m about to rant about our local cable internet provider, Shaw’s, mediocre email. Their hit-and-miss SPAM filters decided to block an email newsletter that I manage for a local retailer. I hate it when that happens. Shaw.ca email addresses are about 25% of the list, so when they block a message, I know. And it makes my numbers look bad.

When picking an email address, you have three general options:

Your own hosted email (maybe like the one at work?)

A free webmail provider such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail (actually, these are not strictly webmail, in particular Gmail offers excellent standards based access to your mailbox that you can use with any standard email application).

Your Internet Service Provider’s free email. Around here, the two big providers are Telus (ADSL) and Shaw (Cable). Of course, if you use our Ivy DSL service, we offer you ivydsl.com email addresses too.

What should you use?

I strongly recommend that you use a webmail provider. Especially Google’s Gmail.com. However, Microsoft’s Hotmail.com and Yahoo’s Mail are satisfactory too, certainly better than your ISP.

Why?

To your ISP, email is an expense. No one ever chooses between ADSL and Cable Internet because the email is “better”. Thus, the incentives are to put the least effort and expense into email services. As long as the service is passable… it doesn’t really matter.

To a webmail provider? Email is the product. Period. It has to be good, and it has to keep getting better to be competitive. The more people that use their service, the more advertising that they can sell.

The big webmail guys have 100’s of millions of email accounts. Your big ISP? I think Shaw and Telus each have less than 10 million accounts. Bigger is better when it comes to providing email. Your staff and equipment and processes get spread over more users. Providing good email boxes is complicated, thanks to the incredible volumes of SPAM.

Besides, some day you will change your ISP – unless of course you intend to stay with your ISP until the day you die. When you do change providers, you’ll have to also change your email address. That’s a lot of work. Choose a 3rd party email provider, and you won’t have to worry about that.

The proof is in the pudding. Most people don’t maintain an email address at major email providers for testing purposes. I do. The test shaw.ca email address is full of opt-in email newsletters that have been misfiled as SPAM. Including the occasional one that is managed by me.

There will probably be more posts regarding email newsletters, particularly ones in BC and Alberta. It’s something I deal with a lot, and it’s about time I share some tidbits.

The biggest fix, is that our site now works properly in current versions of Google Chrome. Our web based system for generating highly printable bingo cards is great… but once in a while we run into compatibility issues. For now, it’s fixed. We’ve tested in current Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari web browsers. Ironically, part of the programming fix was related to a compatibility tweak for Mozilla browser from years back. Mozilla users, if you actually still exist, you will need to use a different browser to use print-bingo.com now.

At the same time, we made live a feature that we wrote for a custom bingo job a few months back. All bingo cards within a single run are now guaranteed to be unique. Previously, it was entirely random if a card was duplicated in a run – but it was highly, highly, unlikely. In fact, we programmed an email notification if the dupe-tester actually catches a dupe.

We had to hard-code a duplicate entry to actually make sure the dupe tester and the email notifier worked. The odds of duplicate cards that are randomly generated is extremely low – you can’t generalize exact odds, since every custom bingo card design is different.

The site has probably generated 1,000 card runs since the new code went live… and we haven’t been notified of a duplicate card yet. If we ever catch a dupe, we’ll be sure to post about it.

More code changes are on the way. It’s summer, traffic to print-bingo.com is lower than normal.